


Half-Baked Plans

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-26 10:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17744627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Deep beneathThe Thyme Machine, Prague's premier bakery, owner and head baker Václav Koller is keeping a secret.Well, two secrets, actually.





	Half-Baked Plans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacehopper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/gifts).



> THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO THIS. ♥

The thing about flour was that it got _everywhere_. 

By now, Václav had his routine down to a T. Once the bakery was closed up for the evening—the counters wiped down, the plates washed and disinfected, the floor mopped, every endless chore checked up by one of his employees or, far more often than he liked (whenever one of his people got spooked by working for an Aug, got carted off to Golem, or just fucking decided not to come in anymore), by Václav—he took the elevator down to The Dungeon and began the long, arduous process of cleaning himself.

Václav's augs were built to come apart, at least. He unlatched each finger on his left hand one by one, laying them out on a tray he kept for the purpose next to his basement sink. (Used to be he'd just pile them wherever he could find the nearest bit of empty space on one of his tabletops. He'd gotten more responsible about that ever since he managed to lose a pinky under a pile of reclaimed ankle joints. Stupid thing took him _hours_ to find.) His palm, each segment separated with the connecting screws lined up next to it, came next; then wrist and forearm and elbow, and when he'd cleaned and reassembled and reattached it all he _still_ had to do it all over again for the right arm.

His augs were good craftsmanship, of course. Sturdy. (Screws, not glue, and none of that mass-produced shit that left you paying for a fancy brand name stamped on a piece of plasticky junk.) They'd been made to withstand everything his rea job threw at him: blood, viscera, infected augmentation sites and augs so poorly maintained they'd rusted to bits. Even still, this whole routine was one long hassle—as annoying and as unavoidable as getting stopped by the cops or his visits to Nikoladze's place.

Costly, too. He was replacing parts of himself more frequently than he'd ever had to before.

"I should've opened a bookshop," Václav grumbled, snapping the fingers back of his right hand back into place with a flourish. Fucking _medovnik_. Honey was a nightmare to scrub out of his knuckles.

"A bookshop?"

Václav jumped at the voice—and the accompanying splash—behind him. He was so used to talking to himself that sometimes he half-forgot he wasn't alone down here anymore.

"Well, sure." He turned around to lean against the countertop and wriggled his newly reattached fingers at his guest. "Not that anyone reads these days, but—would've been nice, yeah? Bookshops are cool. No one returns a book because they think it's too stale or because they thought something labeled bacon-and-cheese would be vegan." He grimaced. "Or because they found an eye in their muffin, hah."

"...Tell me that didn't actually happen." 

His guest—Adam Jensen, possible secret agent and living enigma extraordinaire—was staring at him over the edge of a claw-footed tub with an expression somewhere between curiosity and horror. Václav thought of him as _Adam_ and called him _Jensen_ ; there were some levels of formality you didn't cross when talking to a man with retractable nanomolecular wrist-mounted blades.

"It was _fine_. It was an augmented eye, not organic! And we gave him a gift card, so he was thrilled. Happy endings all around."

It had been nerveracking, those first few days after, wondering whether the customer would report what he'd seen. Václav would've been fucked in ten different directions if he had. 

Still, better to let his real business seep into his front than the opposite; if Koller gummed up Radich Nikoladze's foot with pastry dough or made a mistake because he'd been dealing with customers all day, there'd be no wondering whether he was about to die. Václav's head would be shipped express-mail back to _The Thyme Machine_ before he even had a chance to protest—body not included.

Adam made a discomfited noise in the back of his throat and pressed a gold-accented hand tiredly against his face. "I'm not sure I should be eating your food."

It was a moment before Václav could respond. He got distracted, sometimes, watching the way Adam's augmentations worked: the contrast of pitch black on pale skin; the sleek lines of articulation in his wrists and elbows and shoulders; the way his gloriously mechanical lower half shifted with each movement, flicking droplets of water over himself, like the complex play of balances and counterbalances at work inside him was the simplest thing in the world to control. 

(Not his fault, really. Anyone would be distracted by a body like Adam's.)

"Well, hey, good time to get work then, right? I'll have you picking up your own take-out before we know it."

Adam hesitated. Finally, he gave Václav a quick, short nod. "All right."

Adam wasn't exactly mobile, so Václav had a little workstation set up in the corner of the room that he now shared with Adam—a stool and a light and a little tray of sterilized tools, all the basics he needed to do diagnostics on the average Aug's setup. Scattered around here and there were _much_ more specialized tools, because Adam's augmentations were about as far from the average Aug's setup as a Golem City hovel was from the Taj Mahal.

It was the quality, for one. Every screw and bolt and pin in Adam's joints clearly had been hand-designed, every carbon-black edge of him cut and shaped by a million-credit machine in some pristine high-tech laboratory. His augmentations were a work of passion, the kind of craftsmanship-for-craftsmanship's-sake that you just didn't see anymore, and backed by a fucking insane amount of money.

And, beyond that, well. It was the _design_.

Václav knew augmentation. He was an expert, or at least he was the the closest fucking thing left to an expert in this aug-murdering shithole of a city. He knew his way around the standard designs, and most of the more esoteric-slash-illegal setups too.

But Adam? He'd never seen anything like Adam's augs before in his life.

"Where do you want to start?" Adam asked. He was staring at Václav through his opaque lenses—or, at least, Václav assumed he was—and there was a little twist of impatience or nerves to the corner of his mouth.

"Uh, same place I left off is good, if you want to just—?"

He made an awkward sort of upwards gesture, his hand clawing towards the ceiling, and Adam—carefully, delicately—let his tail break the surface of the water and maneuvered it to hang over the edge of the tub. It lay there, gleaming a dark chrome as rivulets of water ran down its mechanical contours, the fins flexing slightly with Adam's breathing as if it were a living part of him.

 _Fuck,_ Václav thought, dry-mouthed. He'd never get used to it.

Because, okay, it wasn't like Adam was the only person with some weird augmentations; Václav had seen the catalogues _Temptacle_ put out monthly. But those were cheap, easy gimmicks, quick to break down and meant to look good for Natches who wanted a taste of the exotic. Adam's tail was a work of cyber-age design, decades before its time: it fit perfectly to his hips, where the legs would begin on a less-interesting person, and moved and functioned with all the flexibility of a shark's tail and all the durability of enhanced nanocarbon. 

Václav whisked a few preliminary tools—flashlight and screwdriver, check—off of the waiting tray, and engaged the multitool in his right hand with a tap against his palm. 

He shivered at the first brush of his hands against Adam's sleek body, turning one of the fins towards the light to examine the interlocking system that held it together. Part of an ankle, maybe? Or a heel?

"This okay?" he asked, glancing Adam's way.

"Fine," Adam said. He already had his head tilted back towards the ceiling, studiously looking at anything except his own body.

"All right." Václav pulled his eyes back to the task at hand, not daring to stare at Adam's face for too long. "Still wish I could get you into The Chair for a while, I swear it would be easier."

"That's not going to happen." 

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Just—wishing, you know? Gotta have dreams."

Adam didn't say anything in response to that, which... fair enough.

His augmentations didn't like being out of water too long, something he and Václav had discovered together during Adam's first (and only) disastrous session in The Chair. His shark-like augmentation clearly wasn't meant for long-term use, but while there was some sort of system in place in Adam's body meant to transform it back into something more human, it was stubbornly refusing to trigger. And Adam, who kept insisting his last memories were of falling into the Arctic Ocean _six months ago_ as if that made any sense at all, wasn't much help on that front.

When Václav had pulled him out of the Vltava (his arms wrapped around Adam's torso as he pulled the unconscious bulk of meat-and-metal to the riverbank, chanting "What the fuck what the fuck what the _fuck_ " under his breath in a desperate panicked rhythm all the while), there was a moment where he thought he'd found a goddamn real-life merman. 

But Adam was all too human, and he wasn't supposed to be like this. And so it fell to Václav—Václav who was all but owned by the Dvali, Václav who ran a clinic in the basement of his bakery, Václav who didn't have a clue what he was doing with his life anymore—to try and fix him.

No pressure. Václav grimaced.

He prised gently at the plating along one of Adam's fins, sliding a panel gently open to try and follow the paths of circuitry inside. 

_Beautiful_ , he thought, caught between envy and desire as he dug down deep into Adam. The man was a work of art—and not half-bad company, either, even as trapped down here as he was with Václav. He'd be even more amazing once his augmentations were working again.

And if Václav couldn't figure it out, if this obscene mechanical marvel living in his fucking bedroom turned out to be too much even for him...

Well, Adam wouldn't kill him for it. Not like good old Mr. R. But Václav might wish he was dead out of sheer embarrassment, not to mention the cold shame of disappointing someone like Adam. The guy deserved better than Prague and a clammy little basement and Václav's charming company.

(Hah, god. Václav would go crazy if he was stuck with no one but himself to talk to for a _week_. Adam was coming up on three weeks now, and if he started chanting in tongues and scribbling on the walls in blood Václav wouldn't even be able to blame him.)

"Koller?" Adam asked, breaking Václav out of his spiral of nerves.

"Uh. Yeah?"

_Don't ask about my progress, don't ask about my progress..._

"...Thanks. For everything." He reached out, tentatively, and brushed one sleek hand against Václav's shoulder. His hands were warm, even by augmented standards, and his touch was gentler than Václav would have expected. There was something almost tentative about it.

"I mean—yeah, definitely." Václav shivered at the brush of his fingers. Holy _fuck_. "Seriously, Jensen, don't even mention it. We clanks have to stick together, right? Your problems are my problems." 

Adam winced a little, enough Václav could catch it even through those glasses of his. "I'm sorry. I wish they weren't."

"Are you kidding?" Václav patted Adam's hand where it rested on his shoulder, both to be comforting and because the back's of Adam's knuckles felt _amazing_ to the touch. "You think I mind, Jensen, really? Honestly, it's nice having a roommate—especially one as fucking cool as you. And one who doesn't complain about the mess. Hell, you want to stay after you're all better, I'll be happy to have you." He grinned. "But maybe I'll start charging rent, once you can walk again. Chicken Foot doesn't pay for itself, you know?"

Adam snorted. The barest hint of a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth; even that was enough to turn his stone-faced demeanor into something so much more open. "I... I'll keep that in mind." He pulled his hand off Václav's shoulder and back into the water. "And—really. Thank you."

Václav bit the edge of his lip, trying desperately to keep from bursting into laughter out of sheer delight.

 _Right_ , he thought. His nervousness had disappeared, replaced with the beautiful jittery-edged adrenaline rush of having a _really_ interesting puzzle to work on.

He'd figure this out. didn't need to be nervous. All that shit was just false modesty, useless self-doubt this claustrophobic city of Naturals had forced into his head. He was a fucking tech wizard. One way or another, he'd find a way to help Adam.

And when he did... well. 

Maybe, if he was lucky, Adam would actually decide to stick around for a while. A person had to have dreams, after all.


End file.
